July 03, 2005

• Building size: 6500 sq foot. The city offered them $100 per sq. foot. Comes to $650,000 plus relocation costs, maybe that'd add up to 1,000,000 total. A quick search on craigslist confirms that this is not even fecking close to the market values of this space. That is all.
• ^^^ see here. That's $517 per sq. foot, and that's residential zoned.
• Let's all sing together: "And the star-spangled banner forever shall wave O'er the land of the free and the home of the brave!" Or, alternatively, let's just laugh ourselves to death.
• Hehe. How long before civil war? Couple of years, you reckon?
• Well, Chy, I figure that it will take us a little longer than that. Probably happen sometime during the reign of Jeb the 1st. Be thankful you are far, far away.
• There's wrong, and then there's what happened to those guys ... What *the fuck* was the Supreme Court thinking? Now it'll go to Congress and we'll get about half of our property rights back, and eventually someone will come along and do it all over again, then we'll have a quarter of what we had and so on and so on, ad infinitem. Politicians have been remarkably quiet on this one, too.
• drivingmenuts: I've noticed they've been quiet also. My guess, from reading the majority opinion, is that since this hinged on a states rights vs. federal power that this is a potential land-mine for those who have argued states rights in the past several years. From the Kelo v NL majority opinion:

  Viewed as a whole, our jurisprudence has recognized that the needs of society have varied between different parts of the Nation, just as they have evolved over time in response to changed circumstances. Our earliest cases in particular embodied a strong theme of federalism, emphasizing the “great respect” that we owe to state legislatures and state courts in discerning local public needs. See Hairston v. Danville & Western R. Co., 208 U.S. 598, 606—607 (1908) (noting that these needs were likely to vary depending on a State’s “resources, the capacity of the soil, the relative importance of industries to the general public welfare, and the long-established methods and habits of the people”). For more than a century, our public use jurisprudence has wisely eschewed rigid formulas and intrusive scrutiny in favor of affording legislatures broad latitude in determining what public needs justify the use of the takings power.

  Further down at last paragraph of the decision, they say it is up to the state or local governments to restrict the scope of eminent domain takings. Yes, that sound is the sound of ten thousand libertarian's heads exploding.
• Tip of the iceberg. Pretty soon it will just become a case of "follow the money." In these cases, just keep an eye on what developer is receiving the construction/realty contracts and how much they have given to particular legistators. This is a nightmare that will get much, much worse.
• If I read that right, the Supreme Court punted it back to the states or municipal authorities. *If* that's the case, I agree that's the right thing to do. The problem is then the local authorities (which is usually the case). Still, our Congress is going to need to do something. And The People have no power there anymore.
• First off, let me just say that I *hate* the Kelo decision and I personally think it's one of the worst rulings they've made in ages. (I'm really baffled, honestly... did Justice Stevens ACTUALLY believe he was doing anything but giving the cities a free pass with a couple hoops to jump through?) But we're stuck with it. And there are two things we can do now. First is lobby Congress. Since this ruling has outraged, oh, pretty much EVERYONE except developers and corrupt local government, it wouldn't take much lobbying. I believe the House is already working on a bill to rein this in. But, here's the other thing, and ian would say nailed it right off. The courts have always viewed the emanent domain clause as a two-pronged test. "Is it for public use?" *AND* "Is it just compensation?" What I'm amazed by is that no one, AFAIK, has attempted to challenge one of these on the grounds of the second question. Granted, "just" is a nebulous term. But I think that could hold up just on common sense. If the price being offered for a business is NOT sufficient to turn around and set up the same business, in a similar building, in a similar location, then it is quite clearly not "just." If we could get a precedent on the books saying, in essence, the governments must pay for the business \ homeowner relocation then they'd be a whole lot less likely to do this, since one of the big draws is the ability to snatch the land for cheap. Of course, the problem would be that this could could probably find a way of rationalizing that "'just' is whatever the government says it is." And then we'd REALLY be fscked.
• I too oppose the Kelo ruling, but I've been wondering lately about what to do to bring the age of highways, SUVs, and sprawling suburbia to an end. We don't have much oil left, and I'd rather it not be used to boil the planet. One obvious solution is to bring the burbarians back to the cities, for which we will need to make the cities more compact and efficient. It might require radical restructuring such as entire districts limited to public transportation only, etc. Between these compact cities we will need fast ground transportation, using maglev trains or something. A lot of this will require ejecting private property owners who are adamantly in the way. The final clause of the fifth amendment is overdue for some careful re-assessment, I think, assuming we do intend to plan for the end of oil. (And I do believe that any worthwhile plan will involve radical changes.) The particular incident in this thread is, of course, simply a huge miscarriage (abortion?) of justice. To quote Sen. Patrick Leahy, it's contemptible.
• I absolutely agree, tensor. That's one of the reasons I bought my house within walking distance of downtown Denver, which is where I work. When I bought my home ten years ago, the neighborhood was blighted (and cheap), but now it is in a "gentrification" mode (good and bad aspects). Anyway, my neighborhood happens to be zoned high-density, which had no appeal previously. Now that the area is coming up, and it's chic to live downtown, developers are sniffing around. So help me, if the government seeks to condemn my property for a higher good, I will fight to the death to keep the house I put so much into. Although I owe much less in mortgage than the property's current valuation, I can see the powers that be using shit tactics to de-value my property and force me into foreclosure. It was a scary prospect before this decision, and now it's real.
• ... or maybe you favor high-density development around urban centers, as opposed to single-family homes. If that's the case, then a hearty fuck you and a happy Fourth of July from those of us who took a chance on these "underpopulated" areas.
• Interestingly enough, I think that this issue could be a tipping point for liberals as well as libertarian conservatives. Liberals could potentially take advantage of the "little man against corporate greed" and libertarian conservatives against "overarching government". We might just have a consensus here against the religious conservatives and the neo-cons. Let's just see if it coalesces.
• Let's hope so. I'm a conservative, and I'm prepared to hold my representative's feet to the fire over this issue. I think they do this because uprooting people is a lucrative practice.
• or maybe you favor high-density development around urban centers Yes. That is the only way we can sustain an ever growing population even as fossil fuel sources begin to run out. Even this will only delay armageddon, not prevent it. Prevention requires drastically reducing our population (pick your favorite method) and perhaps also discovering a good alternative to fossil fuels. I don't think either is likely at all. Our generation might be the last to enjoy a relatively high level of comfort; our kids are fucked. A happy America Day to you too.
• Even this will only delay armageddon, not prevent it. Prevention requires drastically reducing our population (pick your favorite method) Perhaps those silly Nazis were on to something all along!
• I have a favorite method of reducing our population. Want to hear it? Here it go. Everone gets one child credit. With that credit, you can birth/obtain one child. So, a couple can have two children. If they want more than that, they have to get another credit somehow. Possibilities would include finding somebody who doesn't want a kid and requesting/buying their credit, divorcing and finding new spouses who haven't used their credit, or taking in foster children. Adoption counts as use of a credit. So, the math goes that the population won't increase. In practice, you'll have people who support population decline who don't use or sell their credits, so the population would slowly decline. And I don't mean this as a rule for countries that are overpopulated only. I mean this as a rule for everyone everwhere. I think this method is fair and that we are aproaching the point where we have the identification methods and informatics resources to pull it off. It involves a huge incursion on the rights of individuals to live as they like, but I think that gain for humanity as a whole is so great that it more than offsets.
• tensor and yentrouc - why couldn't families who own single family dwellings who don't want to leave their homes be allowed to live in their houses until the original owners die or they decide to sell on their own? And. if the orignal owners have died, shouldn't the eventual heirs be allowed to sell on the open market to some speculator who thinks he might be able to get a better deal than the owners did? Sorry to bring sentimentality into this, but owning a home still is the "American dream" to many people of marginal income, whom I have to assume would be the types to be replaced. Plus, it's hard for people to give up places they've lived in for years - where their children grew up and where they thought they could live in for years until they died. To offer them what may be less than replacement value, even for family owned businesses (as seemed the case in the Oakland story) looks pretty totalitarian to me. I do think that the cost of allowing these people to continue to live and work on their properties as long as possible seems just. The small town I live in decided, about 10 years ago, to condemn a parcel of land of maybe 3 by two blocks in area where hispanic and asian businesses had existed for generations, a major development on the scale of our town's size. Those who were reluctant to sell were forced to, and the area was taken down to the ground at least 7 years ago. The city thought they had a developer, though who the developer was has changed several times after that. But nothing has developed. They're now focusing on an undeveloped area to the south og town, and the empty lots in the center of town are still empty. They've now decided to do a combination of business and residential developmentin those emptly lots, next to the railroad tracks. So they've gone from thriving businesses to residential areas in the worst place, and businesses which will have to compete with their newly imagined major commercial development on the far outskirts of town. (As a side note, the new development will include a 16 screen movie complex, while we can't support the two local theaters - one has closed and one is suffering.) Cities on the grand scale may do it better, and they still have time to make sure that their citizens/taxpayers suffer as little as possible since these things takes years from concept to reality. Seems to me that this decision assumes that local governments know what they're doing, but I can attest that not all do. And the businesses they condemned could have gone on supplying taxes to the city for all this time, if the city had planned its development more reasonably.
• path - my comment only addressed overpopulation, not the property rights issue in the original post. My thoughts on that are that if the person isn't given enough money to set themselves up in an identical manner nearby, then the deal shouldn't go down. So, I think it's fine to oust people from their homes/businesses as long as a true replacement value is offered. So, the Oakland deal sucks, IMHO.
• I disagree strongly. Who's to say that a neighborhood is "blighted" when it's in a suddenly attractive area? You would force people out of the homes they have lovingly maintained (thereby making the area financially attractive)? That is an elitist and johnny-come-lately call. Yes, wait for hard-working middle class people to upgrade the area so that the fat-cat pigs can steal the value. What the hell does "true replacement" mean? Nothing, when you have to leave everything you knew, because it's expeditious to a class of people you can't out-gun.
• It's not leaving everything you know to have to move a couple of blocks away to a house of the same or larger size, and same or better quality, as independently appraised. That is what I meant when I said a true replacement. So, I guess I'm not only thinking of adequate money to buy a new house/business, but also help in getting a place in the same neighborhood if they want it. The developers would simply have to extend their negotiations to the neighorhood surrounding the plot they want to develop, and make sure they can place everyone. I know this doesn't happen, just like owners aren't given adequate money for their properties. But I would find it fair, or fair enough, if it did. Waiting for everybody to be ready to sell would mean that urban areas would rarely be re-developed, and that needs to happen if we want to stop the endless expansion of the suburbs. Of course, I find it a better idea to just stop the expansion of the population, and then we'd have all the housing we need. But that's even more unlikely than having fair emminent domain deals.
• What I'm talking about is entire neighborhoods being pulled up, and offered the "market value" (according to the government) for their homes. The government is notoriously pro-business. Therefore, I could lose my home on a beaureaucrat's say-so. Won't happen.
• Everone gets one child credit. With that credit, you can birth/obtain one child Sounds good, yentruoc! I'll volunteer to butcher the children born without a corresponding credit for human consumption. BBQ babyback ribs - mmm!
• Well, quid, I once thought of a similar idea to yentruoc's, except that everyone gets mandatory contraceptive implants (both male and female) once they hit puberty. And they can't remove those implants till they're 21(or if they get married before hitting 21). Maybe contraception becomes mandatory even past 21, and you're allowed to remove them only if you have a credit to get a child? (Although personally the whole credit system gives me a bit of heebie-jeebies, after hearing horror stories about China's one-child policy)
• No! I want my damn baby cutlets!
• Sorry for being redundant, but I will repeat that this Oakland incident is a complete travesty. My comments above were not intended as support for the Kelo decision. Sorry if you got that impression.
• quid - a modest proposal you've got there...could be something to it. I was of course thinking something along the lines of China's system of heavy fines. alnedra - some good/bad news re: China horror stories. According to some research, about 75% of the gender gap between boys and girls in China is caused by hepatitis. So, bad news that there is so much hepatitis in China, but good news that they aren't really drowning all their girl children, as had previously been supposed. Or at least, not at such a high rate.
• Cripes, yentruoc, you Americans have ten times as much space per head as us Brits, and you want to impose radical population controls? If you just spread out a bit, you won't even be able to see each other.
• Spreading out requires transportation, which (at present) requires oil, which is not good. If American oil ever gets as expensive as British oil (and I pray it does, and soon, and goes further), the population in the cities will naturally explode. In any case, "space per head" is a silly metric when most of that space is uninhabitable.
• Not really worried about crowding, at this point. More worried about the earth's population as a whole being too high to be sustainable. And not sustainable at abject poverty levels - sustainable with a reasonable quality of life. Everything I read indicates that populations don't slow as they reach maximum sustainable density. They overshoot and there are mass dieoffs or at least a big dip in the quality of life. I keep hearing that there is plenty of food to feed everyone on the planet, that it's just bureaucracy and corruption getting in the way. But how long will that be true? Are we nearing maximum capacity, long ways to go, already there? Total population density, rather than local population density, is going to be an issue at some point. So, the logical thing to do is to slow or stop total population growth until we figure out what the problems are and how to deal with them. I look at it like global warming - the problems aren't going to crop up immediately, but down the line. But starting to deal with it now would save a lot of time/effort/money down the road.
• The 'spread out' suggestion was certainly on the silly side, tensor. But do you really think the USA is over-populated? How much of it do you reckon is uninhabitable? You may be a bit pessimistic, yentruoc - the population of Europe has started gently declining of its own accord without anything nasty happening. How did we get on to this?
• Yes, I think the USA is overpopulated. I think back to my childhood in Ohio in the late sixties, and things were a lot emptier then. You could walk in downtown Columbus in the middle of the day and see may be a dozen people. I don't remember getting caught in a traffic jam until the eighties. These days Columbus is a busy, noisy, unruly, congested, overflowing mess. Of course, in comparison with, say, India (absolute value) or Bangladesh (density), we're still the frontier lands. If I recall correctly, the population growh rates in the US and Europe are roughly similar if we ignore immigration. (Before anyone complains, I think we in the US have a sensible rate of immigration, and Europe needs to increase immigration some more.) When the world finally achieves a negative growth rate, I'll be the first to rejoice. Heck, I'll even rejoice when just India and China together achieve a negative growth rate. To answer yentruoc's question, I think 2-3 billion is roughly the right population for Earth. PS, time is four-sided, and those who deny its cubic nature are educated stupid.
• I think you're mistaken about population growth rates in the US and Europe. This article is a bit elderly but still interesting.
• Ah, thanks. I find many of that article's statements questionable. (Why) do people still in 2005 believe that America is a good place to immigrate and bring kids into? Do they not see our imminent economic collapse, dead industrial sector, declining levels of education, increasingly xenophobic population, and, not least of all, the significant surge in anti-American sentiment worldwide? Do they not worry about our essentially nonexistent health care (except for the rich), our unaffordable real estate (except by the rich), our good schools and colleges that are increasingly out of reach of mere mortals (the rich excepted)? I am surprised that we don't have a larger brain drain already, given what shambles our public policy is in.
• I am surprised that we don't have a larger brain drain already Looks like there's some going on right here in this thread.